None of the prior art taken individually or collectively discloses and teaches a method for color imaging at long range with the color quality as provided by the current invention.
Panchromatic sharpening is a well-known technique that involves devoting more spatial resolution to the luminance channel of a television than the chrominance channel. Analog color television systems devote less frequency capacity or spectrum to color (chrominance) information than luminance information.
Modern versions of panchromatic sharpening use complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) imagers that use a few photo detectors to sense color and many photo detectors to sense luminance (an achromatic signal), so the color signal has much less resolution than the luminance signal.
All of the prior art, however, differs from the invention described in this disclosure in that visible light is used for both luminance and color. Also, the digital algorithms used to recover high resolution imagery for this invention is different from prior art processing.